A giant lizard wasn’t the only thing that had moviegoers on the edge of their seats last week. Speaking at the annual shareholder meeting of Cineplex Entertainment, CEO Ellis Jacob unveiled his plan to charge people an additional fee to sit in the middle rows of its theatres. The premium surcharge is only a trial at this point, and for the time being will apply to just one theatre in all of Toronto, but it was enough to unleash a wave of consumer melodramatics: Ticket prices are already outrageous! Cineplex is gouging its customers!! I’m never going to a movie. Ever. Again!!!

The reaction isn’t surprising, but actually, neither is the plan for differential seating prices, when you think about it. It would see customers sitting in two rows in the middle of the theatre pay a surcharge of $2 to $3 on their tickets. If that sounds similar to what’s on offer from the likes of Air Canada, that’s because it is. “As with aircraft, you have coach, business class and first class,” a spokeswoman for Cineplex told the CBC. “What we’ve tried to do is also provide you with a lot of different options.”

The benefits to moviegoers willing to cough up the price of a latte to reserve a prime seat seem obvious—no waiting in lines, no wandering in the dark with your spouse like a pair of social outcasts looking for side-by-side seats. Still, that hasn’t stopped some from seeing shades of a class struggle in the move, with one critic tweeting this marks the end of cinema as “equitable and accessible.” So before this escalates into Occupy Hollywood, it’s best to put things in perspective.

Let’s start by putting aside a few of the fallacies about the movie business that everyone is clinging to. First off, tickets are not ridiculously expensive. In the most recent quarter, the average ticket price (measured by box office revenue per patron) at Cineplex was $9.04. When Godzilla last went on a rampage in 1998, a ticket cost around $8.50. If movie tickets merely kept pace with the rate of inflation since then, they would cost close to $12 today. By that measure, a ticket with a premium seat surcharge is a steal.

For those who claim this move will be yet another nail in the movie-business coffin, well, reports of the industry’s death have been greatly exaggerated many times before. It wasn’t all that long ago many observers wrote off the movie business altogether, built as it is on luring people to pay to see blockbuster films that, with little effort, can be downloaded for free, or streamed a few months later through Netflix or other on-demand services. And yet for all its struggles, theatres remain crammed for hit films.

Lastly, and this might come as a shock, but going to movies is not an inalienable human right. Cinemas are in it to make money. The real shock is that theatres took so long to innovate on the prices they charge.

It was only over the past few years that Cineplex carved out a premium movie business with its UltraAVX and VIP cinemas. Featuring larger screens, better sound, reclining chairs, reserved seating and food and alcohol services, moviegoers in these cinemas pay anywhere from $3 to $7 over and above the standard ticket price. The advent of 3D movies and their premium prices also helped. These initiatives, aided by higher concession prices, boosted Cineplex’s bottom line and doubled its stock price since 2011, though a slump in margins in recent quarters has analysts calling for more pricing power.By tinkering with seat pricing in its traditional auditoriums Cineplex is doing just that.

The industry’s history with innovation is spotty. For the longest time, theatres clung to uniform pricing—the mantra of one ticket price for blockbusters and indie films alike. There were attempts to change this. When Godzilla stomped through theatres 16 years ago, Edgar Bronfman Jr., who then still controlled Universal Studios, bemoaned the practice of charging the same price for all tickets. Nothing came of his complaint. In one 2007 study, researchers Barak Orbach and Liran Einav examined all the variables the movie industry could exploit with variable pricing but didn’t. Why not higher prices for particularly popular movies? Moviegoers prefer certain days of the week, while movie attendance at Christmas is four times greater than October. Yet for the most part, prices remained the same all year long. “We could not find any good reason for the general, ‘across-the-board’ practice of uniform pricing,” they wrote. Cineplex has done much to overhaul this system, but there’s more it could do.

Major League Baseball offers a model. In recent years, teams have experimented with different pricing for tickets depending on the time of day and day of the week of games. If a popular opponent is in town, prices go up. Some teams, like the San Francisco Giants, have gone further, with dynamic pricing that uses algorithms to crunch data—such as the weather, how a team has performed, if there’s been a home-run streak—and adjusts prices in real time up to 24 hours before a game. When the stars align, prices rise. In a slump, they fall to fill seats. It’s a balance to keep fans happy and maximize ticket sales, and it’s something perfectly suited to the movie biz.

A couple of rows of premium seats among the moviegoing hoi polloi is one thing. Cineplex isn’t going to stop there.

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About this author

Jason Kirby is a columnist and business editor at Maclean’s. Working in Toronto and Vancouver he’s covered money and politics for 13 years in papers and magazines and has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards.

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Two thumbs up for premium-priced movie theatre seats

Statistics don’t lie … unless you’re using the wrong statistics. For the revenue comparison Jason Kirby compared “box office revenue per patron” to “ticket cost”. Those cannot be compared as box office revenue per patron also takes into account children’s tickets while ticket cost seems to be aimed at an adult ticket. Let’s use some actual facts instead. I just went to the Cineplex.com website and picked the lowest cost option for an adult. The result? $14.50 Compared to the “$12″ figure that Jason Kirby brought out the end result is that a ticket in a theatre today is indeed more expensive (adjusted for inflation) than it was in 1998.

Concession food? Well, at West Edmonton Mall there are a number of different types of food to pick from within the theatre so the cost will vary, but for the identical item from a Burger King inside the theatre to a Burger King outside the theatre there seems to be a surcharge of $2 – $3. I am sure that Cineplex is pocketing a fair bit of that surcharge.

Are the seats any larger? No, not really. For theatres that do have a larger seat there is already a premium charge.

Do I mind the premium charges? Not if I have a choice. I am willing to pay to reserve a seat in the theatre as this means that I don’t have to show up in advance to get the seat that I want. I am willing to pay for that convenience. 3D? To be honest, I am at the point where I am willing to pay to NOT see it in 3D. (Or I will have to buy a pair of 2D glasses from Amazon.) If I have an option of paying or not paying I get to make the decision myself. However, by reserving specific rows in a theatre and saying that it costs more to sit here is, in my opinion, not the best way to make a couple of extra bucks. If you could reserve those seats, but no others in the same theatre, than there would be an advantage, but an arbitrary increase just … because?

So, Mr. Kirby, while I appreciate you bringing this to my attention, your ability to compare meaningful numbers is woefully lacking. You cannot just pull numbers from the air and say that they relate.

So, where are you paying $9.50 for a regular adult seat? Its anywhere from $11. to $14 depending on the theatre in Calgary. And I hate the middle seat, crowded, no elbow room compliments of the idiot who thinks he deserves both cup holders, can’t get up an use the washroom and often, some looser who thinks s/he is the gods’ gift to humanity either beside or behind you yammering on the phone all through the movie. I prefer the seat across the side aisle.

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